"A bill outlawing child marriage in Kentucky had been expected to receive a vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, but that vote has been delayed due to last-minute opposition by the conservative Family Foundation of Kentucky, according to the bill’s lead sponsor.

"Sen. Julie Raque Adams, R-Louisville, filed Senate Bill 48 on the first day of this year’s session of the Kentucky General Assembly, which would prohibit anyone under the age of 17 from marrying and only allow 17-year-olds to marry with a judge’s approval.

"Under the current law in Kentucky, 16 and 17-year-olds can marry with their parents’ permission, and a girl of any age under 16 can marry as long as they are pregnant and marrying the expectant father. Likewise, a boy of any age can marry a woman that he impregnates under the current law.

"Adams filed the bill after media reports detailing how Kentucky has the third-highest rate of child marriage in the country — with more than 10,000 children married from 2000 to 2015"
**********

"Two Democratic lawmakers have introduced bills to prevent marriages in Tennessee where a party is under 18 years of age, after a national nonprofit cited three cases in the state where 10-year-old girls were married to adult men.

"Sen. Jeff Yarbro, D-Nashville, who is sponsoring the legislation with Rep. Darren Jernigan, D-Old Hickory, said at a press conference Monday that while many Tennesseans believe the minimum age to marry is 18, a loophole in state law actually allows a judge to waive the age requirement and does not state a minimum age.

"The State Department views child marriage in other countries as a human rights abuse, yet it’s something that happens with frequency in Tennessee and across the country," Yarbro said"
**********

Child marriage here is finely threaded with other practices, including the exchange of a dowry from the bride’s family to the groom, and sometimes with sex trafficking, making it difficult to tackle any one issue without addressing others. Social workers said there are no easy solutions.

...

"Though India’s numbers are promising, a recent analysis of census data highlighted another disturbing finding. In pockets of India, incidents of child marriage are decreasing in rural areas, but increasing in urban settings.

Researchers involved with the study say it is unclear what is causing that phenomenon. One hypothesis is that an uptick in migration from villages to cities could mean that these weddings have simply been redistributed."

"Thousands of physicians attend national scientific meetings annually. Within hospitals, the composition of physicians who attend scientific meetings may differ from nonattendees who remain behind to treat patients, potentially resulting in differences in care patterns and outcomes for patients hospitalized during meeting dates. A quasi‐experimental evaluation of outcomes of patients hospitalized with acute cardiovascular conditions during the American Heart Association (AHA) and American College of Cardiology (ACC) annual meetings compared with identical nonmeeting days in the surrounding weeks found that, within teaching hospitals, patients admitted with cardiac arrest or high‐risk heart failure during meeting dates had lower adjusted 30‐day mortality compared with similar patients on nonmeeting dates"

"Last year, 26% of all trading activity on the NYSE’s flagship exchange took place in the last trade of the day, up from 17% in 2012, exchange data shows. Last year, trades at the close accounted for more than 8% of trading volume in S&P 500 stocks, nearly four times what it was in 2004, according to Credit Suisse .

"While individual investors may follow the market through the day, especially in the past turbulent weeks, it is likely they own funds that track major stock indexes like the S&P 500 whose values depend on prices determined in the closing auction.

"In this auction, traders electronically send transaction orders to the NYSE, home to more than 2,000 companies that include such blue-chip names as Boeing Co. , Walt Disney Co. and Exxon Mobil Corp. The exchange’s computers match the millions of buy and sell orders, with human traders on the NYSE floor sometimes stepping in to help.

"At least $10 billion worth of shares are traded in the NYSE’s closing auction on an average day, with a final tally of stock prices typically listed by 4:05 p.m.

The “close,” as traders call it, has grown in importance as investors pour into index-mutual funds and other vehicles that passively track various stock-market indexes, including exchange-traded funds, or ETFs. "

Wednesday, March 14, 2018

An editorial in The Guardian reminds me of the heyday of bicycle racing.The Guardian view on drugs in sport: a deep corruption: "A devastating report from a parliamentary select committee shows a culture of studied evasion around the abuse of performance-enhancing substances in professional sport"
...
"Over in the world of professional cycling, Team Sky, founded to “win clean”, turns out to have had a terrible problem with asthma among its athletes. Sir Bradley Wiggins apparently suffered from an asthma that could only be treated with a steroid which has the side-effect of allowing endurance athletes to lose fat rapidly while maintaining muscle mass. This is legal provided a doctor has certified that the drug is needed to treat the asthma. "
**********

Summary: "There is overwhelming evidence of the widespread use of performance enhancing
drugs in sport. Some are illegal in any respect; others are legal, but are used in
suspicious ways. Whether permitted for selective use or banned outright, performance
enhancing drugs can have serious consequences for the integrity of sport and the
wellbeing of individual athletes. The huge increase in financial rewards for successful
sports men and women carries the increased risk of incentives to use drugs to cheat.
Our long inquiry has relied on detailed oral and written evidence, academic research,
investigative journalism, and whistleblowers, to uncover this covert and pervasive
activity across different sports. The inquiry studied both agencies responsible for
policing the use of performance enhancing drugs, and the programmes that, as our
report will demonstrate, have used them in questionable ways.
In particular, our inquiry has found acute failures in several different organisations in
athletics and cycling: a failure to share appropriate medical records with anti-doping
organisations; a failure to keep proper internal records of the medical substances given
to athletes; and a failure to outlaw the use of potentially dangerous drugs in certain
sports. All of these failures have occurred in an under-resourced national anti-doping
infrastructure, which has had neither the financial means nor powers of enforcement.
Some steps have been taken to alleviate this context and the failures it has permitted,
but these measures have come too late. We call on those bodies identified in this report
to pay serious attention to our recommendations; we cannot afford to allow these same
failures to happen again."

Here's the actual (pithier) headline and subheadRandom Roommates Only
"Duke University takes away from first-year students the ability to pick their roommates. This move goes against recent trends -- and raises questions about diversity, tolerance and the college experience."

"Duke University has removed from students what has become one of the most significant aspects of matriculation at many colleges: picking a first-year roommate

"Beginning with the Class of 2022, the roommate-selection process will be entirely governed by the university, with assignments largely made at random -- a shift, officials said, meant to stem the recent movement of students self-selecting peers with similar perspectives and backgrounds to their own, fueled by social media connections made before arriving on campus."